


Paradise Lost

by WildandWhirling



Category: Terra Nova (TV)
Genre: Angst, Anti-Taylor Propaganda, Betrayal, F/F, In Vino Veritas, Loss of Faith, Lovers To Enemies, Mira Knows, Mira is Done, Past Relationship(s), Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-21
Updated: 2018-12-21
Packaged: 2019-09-23 23:16:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17089595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WildandWhirling/pseuds/WildandWhirling
Summary: "Still doing Taylor's dirty work?"Or, Lucas speaks too much when he's drunk, and Mira doesn't want to believe that he's telling the truth.





	Paradise Lost

**Author's Note:**

  * For [janetcarter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/janetcarter/gifts).



> Merry Christmas Avery! 
> 
> ~On the first day of Christmas, Santa Steroids gave to me, a corpse buried under a tree~

Taylor’s kid talks when he’s drunk.

 

It’s something they put up with for the sake of the mission, he comes in, gives them their marching orders, and takes a bottle or two of moonshine, the pink-purple liquid spilling across his lips along with the stories. Not that she cares enough to make sense of the stuff, to Mira they’re all the same as those calculations he draws out on the rocks in bold white chalk, rambling on and on.

 

Most of the others, they’re smart enough to avoid him, they’ve been out here long enough to know a Slasher in the woods when they see one. So, that means Mira’s the one to keep him company, giving him another when his stock runs out, praying that there’s enough left over to keep up morale, because that’s always a problem in a hellpit like this.

 

People get lonely, start thinking about the past, wanting things that they can’t have. The alcohol, even if it’s weak compared to the real stuff, helps them drown it out for a little while, though she doesn’t take it. Instead, she keeps Sienna’s face in her head at all times, wrapping herself around it, thinking of her bright smile as she’d walk through the door, dropping the raggedy toy hat Mira’d got her after a mission as she ran to greet her. (She tries to think of whether it was a T-Rex with the faded red fabric and the drooping limbs with the stuffing worn out of them or a spinosaurus, and when she can’t, she feels the need to get out of this place and back into the real world like a jolt in her brain.)

 

This time, there wouldn’t be another time. She’d get the job done, get home, and give Sienna the life that she deserved. And she doesn’t give a damn about what she has to do to get it. That’s what she tells herself, and it’s what she’ll believe.  

 

Until then, she’d keep giving Lucas Taylor the moonshine, quietly hoping he’d choke on it, until he wound up drooling on the floor before going off to brood in a cave for the next six months.

 

“You know what? Those people-I-I feel sorry for them! They’ll never know the truth about the Great Nathaniel Taylor,” he raises his arm suddenly, as if he was trying to give a clumsy toast, spilling moonshine everywhere.

 

 _Uh huh. Daddy Issues story #326_ \- _Been there, done that_ , she thinks as she wipes some of the sticky liquid off of her cheek. The way the kid talks, you’d almost think that this kind of thing was _unusual_. They were all soldier’s kids, these days. They’d all had to do what they had to to survive, and not all of them had mommy and daddy propping them up through the early years, either. Going from home to home, place to place, hoping that a bomb wouldn’t explode over their heads, holding a gun in their hand from the first time they could salvage one.

 

She makes a non-committal sound in response.  

 

“You don’t believe me, do you? Nobody else does, but you see -” Lucas laughs as he leans forward, and Mira wonders if he’s really lost it this time and what to tell Phoenix Group if their golden boy’s finally cracked under the pressure. “I was there. When my father killed him. And now-Now he wants. To kill me. I know everything, about how General Philbrick tried to get my father to step down, and my father killed him as if he was some carno that’d gotten lose. He buried him under Pilgrim’s Tree, he buried him there and let it rot, but-” Lucas smiles, sharp and predatory, and it hits Mira in the gut that he _believes_ this “He couldn’t kill me. I know the truth.”

 

She eyes him as he is, trying to run it through her brain. Taylor’s a son of a bitch, but not a murderer. As if he doesn’t notice, he goes on, slamming down his bottle with a dramatic flourish as he spreads his arms out wide, “The great Taylor family tragedy-The mad king, the exiled prince, and, as always, no one listens to the oracle. But it’s all here,” he taps his head, “It’s all right in here. Don’t believe me?” He says, with the smug self-confidence that makes Mira want to punch his teeth out, even smugger with the alcohol. “See for yourself. Remember the name: Richard Philbrick.”

 

Mira finds herself thinking of it long after he’s back to drooling on the floor, with a hell of a hangover coming in the morning. The kid’s been loose in the wild for too long, everyone knows it. It’s like playing with a tiger to get anything out of him, and most of the time, he speaks in equations, not words, as he holds his _brilliance_ over everyone else’s head. God knows what goes on in his mind.

 

And he hates his father. Not that you need to be a genius to know that one. He’d say anything about him, so long as it’d rain on Taylor’s little “big bright beautiful tomorrow” parade. Taylor’s an optimist, always going on about that bright new future for everyone. Peace, love, the American way, all that bullshit. Murdering someone-It’s not his MO. There’s nothing in the three inches-tall dossier they handed off to her the week before she went through Hope Plaza that’d say that.

 

She turns in her hammock, watching the tops of the trees sway gently in the wind through the little netted opening that’s as close as she’s got to a window, as a pteranodon flies across the moon. There are times she could almost get to like this place. She thinks of Sienna and frowns. Almost.

 

(She remembers the first time she’d seen the moon, without the pollution there to cover it up or a million lights to dim it, white and gleaming and so _big_ , Wash’s arm, strong and warm, around her as they’d made their way to the colony.)

 

The kid’s lying, she tells herself, there’s no point in taking the bait.

 

In the morning, he’s back to scrawling more equations on rocks, and she’s back to taking care of her colony. That should be it.

 

It isn’t.

 

It sits there in the back of her mind, buzzing like a little mosquito that she can’t quite swat. She hates that about the kid, how he can get under her skin, make her think.

 

Taylor as a murderer? It doesn’t fit with that squeaky-clean, messiah complex image he’s tried to work up. Not that he’d be the first. Everyone has their demons, and God knows what’s underneath that benevolent dictator image. But if he was, then…

 

She ignores it, and ignores it, but it's still there, in the back of her mind, and finally, she gives in.

  
  
Is Taylor really capable of that?

  
  
So she checks. Still being in contact with 2149 has its perks, and she doesn’t have to run that kind of thing by Taylor (convenient, the voice whispers in her ear, that he controls the access to the outside world. She’d always thought it was so no one decided to get stuck on something dangerous like “democracy” or “basic human rights,” but it’d be useful as Hell if he was keeping something a secret.)

 

Philbrick's missing they say, but there are holes in the record. Missing in South America? It’s the new “went on a long vacation and never came back.” And even if she’s not out there writing equations on rocks, she’s not stupid. Stupid gets you killed, where Mira’s from. Her employers play the evasion game, remind her what she has to lose if she presses, and she folds. Officially. But she knows one thing: Richard Philbrick’s dead, and wherever he is, it’s not South America.

 

Boylan seems to know everything that goes on in the colony, for the right price, and she corners him one day after they’ve just gotten ahold of some medical supplies.

 

He just shakes his head, “Isn’t enough money in the world to make me tell you that.”

 

“You and he used to be old war buddies, now you can’t stand each other. So what happened?” She tilts her head as she stares him down, the way she knows makes her people stand down when they’re being stubborn.

 

He just shakes his head head again, walking away, and that’s all the confirmation she needs that something’s up.

 

Philbrick’s disappearance.

 

Taylor turning on his own kid.

 

Taylor turning on Boylan.                      

 

It all starts to make sense.

 

But there’s one thing left, one thing she needs: Proof.

 

The next time Lucas shows up, she glares at him, “The body. Where is it?”

 

He smirks in response and takes her to Pilgrim’s Tree.

 

That’s the thing with secrets: They never stay buried, especially if you leave someone alive to tell the tale. And the body of a man, missing a limb in just the right place, well, that tells a story all on its own. There’s no point doing anything with it, when all they have’s the word of Taylor’s unstable son and a corpse against a legend. Better to put him back in the ground and wait for when it can be useful. As they cover the body again, spreading dead leaves across the upturned soil so it looks undisturbed, Mira feels her gut twist.

 

It’s never been _personal_ between her and Taylor. It’s just a job, just like it always was (she tells herself as she thinks of trusting dark eyes sparked by the firelight as Wash sat opposite her, stretching a black hairband absently between her fingers, her black hair loose around her shoulders. That night, she’d forgotten her mission for a moment. Just a moment, but it was enough.)

 

She knows why she didn’t want to believe it: For Taylor to be capable of it, that means that _everything_ Wash told her, all that bullshit about a better future, is a lie. Wash is always there by Taylor’s side, saying “How high?” even before he says “Jump.” (He doesn’t deserve it, she thinks; if she was with them, she’d be raking in a solid 2 or 3 figures more as a medic alone.) There's no way she doesn't know.

  
She’s never been one for the new, better future that Taylor goes on about, about second chances and fresh starts, she has to spend her time on solid ground with what they have now rather than chasing after rainbows and unicorns. But when Wash talked about it, hope in her eyes, Mira’d almost…

  
And as it all comes together Mira feels a little bit of her heart (which is already mostly hardened, after years of war, years of eat or be eaten only a few inches of red pulsing muscle remain, and it's for her daughter and Wash) calcify.

  
"Still doing Taylor's dirty work?" She’ll ask, several years later, as Wash looks up at her in-Hatred? Anger? Surprise? Mira blames the smudged black eyeliner for hiding her eyes.

 

Not that it matters. Not anymore.

  
  
_I know the truth now_ , is what she's really saying, _I'm not naive anymore._

 

_I know._

 

And somehow, it doesn’t feel as good as she thought it would.

 


End file.
